I noted last month that Arab leaders were encouraging Israel to take out Hamas; obviously, the Israelis have decided to accept the invitation, and are now doing their best to do just that.  I’m rooting for them, for several reasons.First, Hamas wants to destroy Israel, and won’t stop until they’ve either achieved their goal or been destroyed in turn.  The same is not true in reverse of Israel, but at some point, Hamas’ relentless efforts will force the Israelis to adopt the same calculus; they can no more coexist with Hamas than Harry Potter could coexist with Voldemort.  To take the point made by Yisrael Medad, “Israel’s stated and practiced intention these past 3.5 years since disengagement was to let Hamas rule as long as no rockets were fired,” and Hamas never stopped firing rockets.Second, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are going to remarkable lengths to avoid killing innocents—an exceedingly difficult thing to do in such an environment, when Hamas has been stockpiling weapons in civilian homes (thus using their own civilians as human shields for weapons intended to be used to kill the other side’s civilians).  As Jerusalem-based historian and IT specialist Yaacov Lozowick relates,

the IDF has figured out how to separate the civilians from the weapons: call the neighbors and give them ten minutes warning. The numbers prove how efficient this has been: prior to the ground invasion, more than 600 targets had been destroyed, fewer than 500 Palestinians killed, and fewer than 100 of those were civilians even by Palestinian and UN reckoning. Of course, there remain the pictures of civilians surrounded by devastation, but they’re alive, and it wasn’t Israel that stacked bombs in their cellars.Apparently, by Friday Israel had made at least 9,000 (nine thousand) such phone calls. . . .In my professional life I deal with complex IT systems, and I’ve given a bit of thought to this issue seen from that perspective:First, Israel clearly has created a sophisticated GIS (geographic information system). A system that records tens of thousands of buildings, their location, and their distance from each other. Then there’s a database with the names of the tens of thousands of families who live in the buildings, and the phone number of each family. The system has the ability to identify all the families and phone numbers that could be affected by an attack on any given building. Finally, given the numbers involved, there must be a system that automatically makes concurrent phone calls to dozens of families, since everybody has to have the same ten-minute warning.Ah, and someone put tens of thousands of piece of information into that database.Such a system costs real money, takes time to set up, and since it is obviously operating close to flawlessly, it was tested, fiddled with, tested, fiddled with, and tested again. The purpose, I remind you, is to save the lives of thousands of Palestinians who happen to have murderous neighbors.

What’s more, they’ve done this despite the fact that

alongside the thousands of civilians whose lives have been spared there are hundreds, at least, of armed Hamas fighters, the people who put the explosives in the cellars in the first place: by warning their neighbors, Israel has warned them, too, thus giving them the chance to escape and fight another day: say, tonight, or tomorrow, when they’ll still be alive to fight the IDF troops, instead of lying dead under the rubble, as would have been possible had we hit their explosive stashes without prior warning, as any normal army would have done.

Lozowick concludes from all this that, contra what our MSM would have you believe,

the IDF is the most moral army in the world. This drives some people bonkers, and they often go ballistic. Alas for them, and fortunately for many Palestinians, it happens to be the simple truth.

This statement might seem ridiculous to many in the West (given, as noted, the picture our media prefer to paint), but the conduct of the IDF makes it a reasonable one—not merely at the tactical level, but at the level of the IDF’s overall goals and approach.  To quote Scott Johnson of Power Line (emphasis added),

The care taken by the IDF to avoid civilian casualties complicates the achievements of its military objectives and increases the hazards to its soldiers, and it doesn’t do much to win Israel friends outside the United States. It is nevertheless an essential component of Israel’s strategy in dealing with its terrorist enemies.

Third, Hamas is Iran’s proxy, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ayatollahs, Inc., and so the battle against Hamas is a battle against Iran by proxy—which makes it a battle the West needs to win.  It also makes it a grand opportunity, as the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Ledeen points out:

Iran could well lose this battle, and defeat is very dangerous to a regime like Tehran’s, which claims divine sanction for its actions and proclaims the imminent arrival of its messiah and of the triumph of global jihad. If Allah is responsible for victory, what can be said about humiliating defeat? The mullahs are well aware of the stakes, as we can see in their recent behavior.

This is an opportunity we can’t afford to lose.  As I’ve written before, we can afford neither to let the biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world go about its work, nor to attack them by any traditional military means; our approach to Iran must of necessity be indirect.  I’ve argued for economic attacks, such as doing everything we can to bring down and hold down the price of oil, and the economic situation is indeed doing the Iranian government significant harm; to quote Ledeen,

the dramatic drop in oil prices is devastating to the mullahs, who had planned to be able to fund terrorist proxies throughout the Middle East, Europe and the Americas. Suddenly their bottom line is tinged with red, and this carries over onto their domestic balance sheets, which were already demonstrably shaky (they were forced to cancel proposed new taxes when the merchant class staged nation-wide protests). No wonder they seize on any international event to call for petroleum export reductions.

However, the current Israeli counteroffensive against Hamas opens up new opportunities at a time when the Iranian government is facing growing, and increasingly brazen, internal opposition.  Ledeen quotes an Iranian expat who told him that when university students in Iran launched significant demonstrations against their government, “they were surprised that the regime was unable to stop the protests, even though everyone knew they were planned.”  Iran has taken a heavy beating among its terrorist proxies since we launched the surge, and that kind of thing is “bad for operations, bad for recruiting, and weakens the Iranians’ efforts to bully their neighbors into appeasement or more active cooperation.”Ledeen is right, I believe, to say that

the Iranian regime is fundamentally hollow, that much of its apparent strength is bluster and deception rather than real power and resolve. At a minimum, it is a regime that must constantly fear for its own survival, not because of any willful resolve from its external enemies but because of the simmering hatred from its own people.

As such, I think we must take his application of this point very seriously:

This is a moment when those people are, as so often in the recent past, looking for at least a few supportive actions. If the West is now convinced that Iran is the proximate cause and chief sponsor of Hamas’ assault against Israel, it should demonstrate once and for all that we are prepared to fight back.

We cannot afford to do so directly, but Israel has given the West the opportunity to do so in a way which is indirect but unmistakable.  Robert D. Kaplan is both typically dramatic and typically spot-on to say that

Israel has, in effect, launched the war on the Iranian empire that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, in particular, can only have contemplated.

As Kaplan says, this is a war which we badly need them to win, because the stakes are very, very high.  If they lose, the results could be war on a very large scale indeed, and a veritable explosion in what he calls “the ideologizing of hatred,” as the mullahs are emboldened; but a decisive defeat for the mullahs, removing the appearance of divine sanction which (as Ledeen points out) is so critical for such a regime, at a time of major economic stress could very well bring them down altogether—and that would produce a very different Iran indeed, because the government is not representative of the Iranian people.  To quote Kaplan,

the one place where Moslems are cynical about Iran is in Iran itself, where the regime relies on a narrow base of support amid a state that (despite its vast oil reserves) is in economic shambles. Thus, the supreme irony of the Middle East is that the place where anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are least potent is in the Iranian heartland. Public opinion-wise, Egypt and Saudi Arabia constitute more dangerous territory for us than Iran. Iran’s benign relationship with the Jews, in particular, stretches from antiquity through the reign of the late Shah.

Iran as an American ally, no longer working to undermine the new pro-American government in Iraq, and jihadist terror movements around the world suddenly out of money; it could happen.  It can happen, if Israel can win a decisive enough victory in Gaza to “leave Hamas sufficiently reeling to scare even the pro-Iranian Syrians from coming to its aid.”I’m rooting for Israel.Update:  Charles Krauthammer and Peter Wehner have done a good job as well in furthering the argument that “the only acceptable outcome of this war, both for Israel and for the civilized world, is Endgame B: the disintegration of Hamas rule.”  As Krauthammer says,

The one-step-from-madness gangster theocracy in Gaza—just four days before the fighting, the Hamas parliament passed a Sharia criminal code, legalizing, among other niceties, crucifixion—is teetering on the brink. It can be brought down, but only if Israel is prepared—and allowed—to complete the real mission of this war. For the Bush State Department, in its last significant act, to prevent that with the premature imposition of a cease-fire would be not just self-defeating but shameful.

Afghanistan, and the Indian subcontinent.  Iraq.  Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.  The Philippines.The Philippines?  Yes, the Philippines are also a significant theater in the GWOT, and the other place besides Iraq where we and our allies have had noteworthy success against the jihadist movement led by al’Qaeda and its allies.  The conflict there is a very different sort, with a different set of restrictions (many of them political, since we’re operating within the territory of a sovereign ally against its own domestic enemies); but as Max Boot and Richard Bennet point out, it offers us a model for how a “soft and light” approach—”a ‘soft’ counterinsurgency strategy, a light American footprint”—can work against terrorist groups.Perhaps the chief benefit of such an approach, where possible, is illustrated by the fact that you probably didn’t even know we’re fighting in the Philippines.  As Boot and Bennet note,

One of the beauties of this low-intensity approach is that it can be continued indefinitely without much public opposition or even notice. The reason why Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines gets so much less attention than the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is not hard to see. In Iraq there are 140,000 troops. In Afghanistan 35,000. In the Philippines 600. The Iraq war costs over $100 billion a year, Afghanistan over $30 billion. The Philippines costs $52 million a year.Even more important is the human cost. While thousands of Americans have been killed or maimed in Afghanistan and Iraq, in the Philippines only one American soldier has died as a result of enemy action—Special Forces Sergeant First Class Mark Jackson, who was killed in 2002 by a bomb in Zamboanga City. Three soldiers have been wounded in action, the most serious injuries being sustained by Captain Mike Hummel in the same bombing. Ten more soldiers died in 2002 in an accident when their MH-47 helicopter crashed. Every death is a tragedy, but with the number of tragedies in the Philippines minuscule, there is scant opposition to the mission either in the Philippines or in the United States. That’s important, because when battling an insurgency the degree of success is often closely correlated to the duration of operations.

As the article goes on to concede, this kind of approach won’t work everywhere, because it “requires having capable partners in the local security forces”; we couldn’t have started off on this footing in Iraq or Afghanistan, and there would be real problems in trying to handle Afghanistan this way (or, just as much to the point, Pakistan) even now, though it seems to me that there would be real benefit to implementing as much of it as we can as part of our operations there.  In Iraq, however, our success in the Philippines offers a worthy roadmap for the way forward. This is ironic, since our conflict in the Philippines at the turn of the last century offered the best model for the initial situation in Iraq; but as the new government in Baghdad and its security forces continue to grow stronger with our assistance, there’s a real opportunity to transition to a model for American involvement along the lines of our work in the Philippines; the surge has won us that opportunity.  Perhaps in another few years our work in Iraq will get as little attention, and be as successful, as our work in Mindanao.  That, it seems to me, is the goal, so that when the House of Sa’ud finally falls, Iraq will be a strong and stable ally in the region as we try to deal with whatever comes next on the Arabian Peninsula.